Lisa Adair-Oberer had some good news to share with the school board and audience at the latest Butler County Board of Education meeting Thursday night.

The instructional and curriculum leader for the school system was happy to report that considerable strides had been made to rectify the issues with student transcripts—in particular students taking the same class multiple times–addressed at last month’s BOE meeting.

A transcript review, monitored by the State Department of Education, has been underway for the past month.

“All of our people involved in this process jumped right in and went to work. All transcripts for seniors at Georgiana and McKenzie have been reviewed and the senior transcripts at Greenville High will be reviewed later this month,” Adair-Oberer said.

As for those discovered to be missing necessary classes in order to receive their diplomas next May, steps have been taken to make sure they can don those caps and gowns.

“We immediately enrolled any student we found in the first two schools who needed to complete additional coursework in Edgenuity, which offers accelerated coursework they can complete in time for graduation.”

While conducting the audit of transcripts, another issue cropped up, said Adair-Oberer.

“We saw that some grades were not being posted and we immediately put a plan into place to remedy this.”

Technology specialist Matthew Shell has been writing a computer script that can be used to streamline the process of posting student transcripts and assist school counselors in getting a heads up on any problems in record keeping and scheduling.

“It’s very important for the master schedule to be correct; if it’s not correct, than the transcripts are also going to be incorrect,” said Shell.

The audit of student transcripts will not end after Greenville High’s seniors are reviewed.

“This is just the first step; we still have to clear up any transcript issues with the juniors, sophomores and so on. And over time we may need to make more tweaks to our procedure. I can say I would much rather take a couple of days to work on a script that takes 13 seconds to run, than spend days and days going through everything manually,” Shell said.

Adair-Oberer said that plans for professional development for the county’s principals and counselors is in the works on how to document data, manage transcripts and create master schedules.

“You could say we’ve all been getting a lesson in transcripts,” she added.

And those lessons are to include students themselves.

“Students do need to know how to read their transcripts.  They need instruction so that they can be advocates in the process. Our record keeping processes are very important to us. We will continue to address our issues and put procedures into place to ensure we don’t have more issues in the future,” Adair-Oberer said.